The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

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Summary: A bottom-up theory of resistance
Review: "The Many Headed Hydra" by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker is an exceptionally well-written and enlightening history of early capitalism. The authors offer a bottom-up theory of resistance and describe the conditions by which the modern nation state was founded as a solution to the problem of proletariat self-rule. Short narratives, biographies and illustrations of key events and individuals are framed within a discussion of the historical forces of the era, making the book an interesting, thought provoking and entertaining read.

Linebaugh and Rediker describe the brutal process of primitive accumulation where the poor were forced off the land to create the proletariat class. The newly-dispossessed were disciplined harshly and made to labor for the benefit of the investor class. However, the pervasive "culture of fear" that was "indispensible to the creation of labor-power as a commodity" eventually led to revolt, first with the English Civil War in the 1640s and later throughout the colonial system.

The authors spotlight individuals who made the case for the rights of all people, including Edward Despard, James Naylor, Tom Paine, Thomas Spence and Robert Wedderburn. These voices articulated the desires of the masses to achieve equality and social justice. As these rights were consistently denied, the seeds of discontent and rebellion were planted. When not organizing resistance against empire, many chose piracy, formed their own renegade communities, or chose to live among the Native Americans.

In this light, the authors present the American Revolution as a cooptation of the democratic movement. Capitalist property and wage relations were legislated in a manner that secured elitist privilege. Race, sex and class effectively served to split the proletariat into factions that could be politically controlled. The nation state thus was born as an instrument to empower the bourgeoisie and channel the energies of the masses towards capitalist accumulation.

The unique value of this book is its convincing argument that the world we know may have turned out very differently. This tantalizing possibility is just one reason why "The Many-Headed Hydra" is an intriguing read. I highly recommend it to all.

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Summary: Sifting the Hidden Histories of the Trans-Atlantic Empire
Review: An importand and relevant book. A must for globalization theorists, cultural studies, and america/s studies....

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Summary: From the bottom up
Review: I recently had the opportunity to see Marcus Rediker speak about his latest book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age." The room he spoke in was absolutely packed, and not just with students seeking to curry favor with their professors. Little kids turned up, as did local high school students. People who went to college when Eisenhower was president turned up as well. Why all the hoopla to see an academic speaking on a weekday evening? One word: pirates. People of all stripes love pirates. They simply can't get enough of these ruffians even though they have been gone from the scene for a couple of hundred years. Something about these rogues appeals to the American spirit, a spirit that also embraces the gunslinger of the Old West. We love the idea of rugged individuals living outside the norms of society, even if that life often led to a violent death at a young age. Look at all the films dealing with pirates and gunslingers, the most recent of which is "Pirates of the Caribbean" starring Johnny Depp. But the book I think Rediker's reputation will ultimately rest upon is this one, "The Many-Headed Hydra," written with fellow historian Peter Linebaugh.

Pirates ultimately play only a small role in this book. What we have here is an attempt to rewrite the entire history of the transatlantic region from a bottom up perspective. In other words, this book isn't a history of the monarchs of England, or the American Founding Fathers, or the merchants who owned the trading companies. It is a history of those too often ignored over the ages, those who toiled on the plantation, those who acted as foot soldiers in the armies of conquest, those who sailed the ships that brought slaves to the New World, and those held in bondage. It is a book about the men, women, and children who built the very tools necessary for the development and expansion of capitalism and colonization. It is a book about the nefarious "hydra," that mythic beast slain by Hercules and whose name the elites applied to anyone who dared challenge their authority. Francis Bacon wrote a treatise about this "hydra," arguing that they were subhuman "monsters" that the authorities should eradicate at the earliest opportunity. These wretches became the "hewers of wood and drawers of water," or peons good only for the basest labors.

The authors argue that several key factors played a part in the creation of this hydra. The most important was expropriation, that disastrous English policy that displaced thousands upon thousands of small farmers so that large landowners could fence in land, which led to such massive social unrest that the authorities had to do something about it. They chose to terrorize, to incarcerate, and execute those opposed to the new order. They also chose to ship many of these people overseas to use them as cheap labor to develop properties in the new world. The authors define subsequent events, everything from slave rebellions in Jamaica to a 1741 insurrection in New York, as class warfare between the poor and the wealthy. Members of the hydra (I should say heads of the hydra), according to the authors, always sought to unify their class interests in order to throw off the yoke of the oppressors. And the oppressors always managed to negate these attempts.

"The Many-Headed Hydra" is an enormous effort of scholarship, covering so many obscure events in British, Caribbean, and American history that the casual reader's mind will certainly founder under the onslaught of information. I'm a graduate student in history and I occasionally found myself looking up some of the events and people cited by the authors. Moreover, there are a couple of extraordinarily dense chapters examining how the hewers of wood and the drawers of water expropriated religion to their own class ends that will further boggle the mind. Not to worry, however, as the general themes of the book crystallize quite clearly through example after example of the attempted rise of the underclass and the subsequent crackdown by those in power. There are so many examples that follow this template that by the time the reader gets to the end of the book he or she is tempted to yell, "Enough already! I get the idea!" Eventual irritation aside, Rediker's and Linebaugh's book is an impressive reinterpretation of transatlantic history. It is also, unfortunately, rabidly left wing and biased. The following example will show the book's emphasis on underclass agency as well as its tendency to overstate its case.

Rediker and Linebaugh claim that impressment, that scurrilous activity effort by naval officers and ships' captains to forcibly coerce sailors into foreign service, was the key factor in starting the American Revolution. While it is no doubt true that the underclass in the American colonies had different beefs with their English masters than the colonial elites did, this book goes way too far in trying to show that the ENTIRE impetus for the revolution started with the underclass. According to the authors, colonial elites witnessing the riots started by disgruntled sailors and other "riffraff" were inspired to internalize this revolutionary fervor. Hogwash. All you need to do is go look for T.H. Breen's "Tobacco Culture," which successfully proved that wealthy colonial planters agitated for war because they owed so much money to English merchants that to stay within the British orbit would have ruined them. At best, we can say that BOTH the underclass and the upperclass had reasons to oust the British, and then went separate ways later. "The Many-Headed Hydra" is useful because it gives us another way to think about transatlantic history, but its one-sided arguments omit much.



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Summary: Empire Begins
Review: In 1741 at Hughson's, a waterfront tavern in New York City, a motley crew of men and women, members of what Linebaugh and Rediker call the Atlantic proletariat planned a rebellion against the New York ruling class. They included among others radical Irishmen and women, Africans slaves, the wretched refuse created by the enclosure of the commons, the plantation system and the slave trade. The rebellion was uncovered by the authorities, its leaders were tried convicted, lynched or broken on the wheel, or sent off to slave in plantations in the West Indies. Newspaper accounts of the time described vast crowds gathering from all over New York and elsewhere to view a peculiar, emblematic and perhaps even prophetic phenomenon. The lynched bodies of two leaders of the rebellion, Hughson, an Irishman, and John Gwin, an African, were left to rot as a warning. In death, the white's body turned black, and the black's turned white

According to the authors, this resistance in New York was not unusual. It was just one of many, many rebellions and uprisings in the Atlantic colonies by what the authors call the "hydrarchy," appropriating Francis Bacon's scurrilous metaphor of the many-headed hydra which he borrowed from the myth of Hercules and used to characterize dispossessed and extirpated peasantry of the Atlantic, a characterization used thereafter by the ruling class to describe those whom they enslaved to the exigencies of capitalism. As the authors say in their conclusion on pages 327-328: "In the preceding pages, we have examined the Herculean process of globalization and the challenges posed to it by the many headed hydra. We can periodize the almost two and a half centuries covered here by naming the successive and characteristic sites of struggle: the commons, the plantation, the ship and the factory. In the years 1600-1640, when capitalism began in England and spread through trade and colonization around the Atlantic, systems of terror and sailing ships helped to expropriated the commoners of Africa, Ireland, England, Barbados and Virginia and set them to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water."

The authors go on to say that in the second phase, 1640-1680, "the hydra reared against English capitalism, first by revolution in the metropolis, then by servile war in the colonies. Antinomians organized themselves to raise of a New Jerusalem against the wicked Babylon in order to put into practice the biblical precept that God is no respecter of persons. Their defeat deepened the subjection of women and opened the way to transoceanic slavery in Ireland, Jamaica, and West Africa. Dispersed to American plantations, the radicals were defeated a second time in Barbados and Virginia, enabling the ruling class to secure the plantation as a foundation of the new economic order."

They describe the third phase in 1680-1760 as the "consolidation and stabilization of Atlantic capitalism through the maritime state, a financial and nautical system designed to acquire and operate Atlantic markets." They note it was "the sailing ship -- the characteristic machine of this period of globalization -- combined features of the factory and the prison." Consider in this regard the famous 'tryworks" chapter in Moby Dick. They go on to say "'In opposition, pirates built an autonomous, democratic, multiracial social order at sea, but this alternative way of life endangered the slave trade and was exterminated." They note that connected with this counterrevolution from above, "a wave of rebellion ripped through the slave societies of the Americas in the 1730s, culminating in a multiethnic insurrectionary plot by workers in New York in 1741."

The final phase of their history tells the story of how the "motley crew" with Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica and a series of uprisings throughout the hemisphere created "breakthroughs in human praxis--the Rights of Mankind, the strike, the higher-law doctrine--that would eventually help to abolish impressment and plantation slavery." He suggests these rebellions also helped to produce the American Revolution, which, they claim, "ended in reaction as the Founding Fathers used race, nation and citizenship to discipline, divide and exclude the very sailors and slaves who had initiated and propelled the revolutionary movement."

After reading this eye-opening leftist history, the polyglot streets of New York, indeed of any port city on the Atlantic, suddenly make a lot more sense. Caught up in the brutal, enslaving machine of capitalism starting in the 1600s, the Atlantic and (and eventually) Pacific proletariat fought back against this deadly system of terror, enslavement and extirpation. And it clearly appears, with the assistance of this people's history of the American colonies, that the sons and daugthers of the hydrarchy are caught up now in just the latest model of Blake's dark, satanic mills, trapped and impressed into the vast, destructive combine of the corporate hegemon.

Too programmatically left wing in its somewhat idealizing potrayal of the rabble as a motley crowd who sought freedom from their enconomic enslavement, who practiced democracy and rebellion in reaction to the vicious disciplinary system of the ruling class? Perhaps, but not as tidy as those histories told from the top down which use the fumigated version of the historical record to tell those grand and increasingly obtuse stories of the birth of freedom, equality and opportunity for all.

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Summary: Wonderful history of resistance to [wage] slavery
Review: Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged, and Marcus Rediker, author of Between the devil and the deep blue sea, have joined forces to produce this splendid history of the hydra of working class resistance and organisation in the 17th and 18th centuries. In wonderfully vigorous prose, they celebrate the defiant spirit of the untameable Promethean multitudes who ended slavery, and created the ideas of cooperative political economy and culture, of those who ‘dare seize the fire’, in William Blake’s words.

They trace the bloody birth of capitalism in 17th century England, and how capitalism spread through trade and colonisation around the Atlantic, expropriating the commoners of England, Ireland, Africa, Barbados and Virginia and imposing slavery. The years 1680 to 1760 saw the rise of the British maritime state: by the 1690s, the Royal Navy was Britain’s largest employer. The authors ...cite James Rawley’s comment, “In the decade of the 1730s England had become the supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world”, though surely England’s ruling class, not the nation, owned the slave ships and ran the plantations.

They tell the stories of the waves of slave revolts and urban insurrections in 1730s and 1740s throughout British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish possessions, notably the New York Conspiracy of 1741 and Jamaica’s Maroon War of the 1730s. In the 1760s and 1770s another wave of slaves’ rebellions provided the arsenal of ideas that inspired the American, French and Haitian Revolutions.

Linebaugh and Rediker vividly depict the struggle against slavery and empire, against the pressgangs and brutality of the owners and employers. They show how sailors organised themselves, ‘a motley crew’, composed of people from all nations. When London’s sailors in 1768 struck (lowered) their sails, they added another weapon, and word, to the workers’ armoury. Using the rebels’ own words and ideas, they tell the stories of those who fought for progress against the owners of the commons, ship, plantation and factory. They portray the revolutionary spirit of those who founded our trade unions, against the law.

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Summary: An Ambitious Look at Atlantic Resistance
Review: The Many-Headed Hydra is both the title of the book by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker a symbol for the proletariat masses resisting the growth of capitalism from the seventeenth to the begininng of the nineteenth centuries around the Atlantic. It is an ambitious book as it looks at certain pivotal times of resistance or revolution througout these centuries in order to connect all of the countries and the various peoples around the Atlantic, including France, the United States, England, Ireland and the Caribbean, and men and women, black and white, sailor, soldier, and artisan. Each of the episodes is interesting and significant in their own right and the connections between them only adds further importance. More research should be done to connect the spaces between the events but this book stands on its own as an important addition to the history of resistance. A very fascinating read.

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Summary: BAd Book
Review: The Many-Headed Hydra will appeal to readers interested in history "from the bottom up". Most histories look at the past from the viewpoint of kings, queens, priests, and others "at the top". In this book, instead of hearing from popes and potentates, we hear the voices of many speakers for and from the poor and forgotten, the working men and women of the English commons, the factories, the tall ships, and the plantations.

As the subtitle makes clear, this is mainly a history of sailors, slaves, and common people who are often ignored or downplayed in history books. The authors contend that these were the men and women mainly responsible for the rebellins and revolts and wars for independence fought in the Atlantic world from 1600 to 1800. In this book, the poeple who actually led the struggle, such as Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre, take center stage. The so-called leaders, from Cromwell to Jefferson, end up with supporting roles and sometimes even play the antagonists' part.

Although the authors write in a lively, engaging manner, some general readers may find the going tough at some points. Both of the authors are history professors, and they clearly feel strongly about what they've written. They don't use lots of specialized historical terms, but they do use many words specific to the periods they are considering. I think they could've helped a lot by including a glossary of some expressions hard to find without an unabridged dictionary. (There's only so much that one can guess from context.)

Also, general readers should approach this book as they would a good novel. For example, sometimes the authors mention people almost out of the blue, as if they'd already been introduced. In fact, they are participants from upcoming chapters. In short, some readers will need to give the authors a little leeway to tell their story, as we would in a novel.

Unlike a novel, this story is complete with many "endnotes" and excellent illustrations covering all the periods they looked at. The book also has a helpful index, but there's no one single list of books and articles. Readers who want to learn more about a particular person or topic will have to follow the trail of notes to the first time a work is cited.

Since this is a book about the Atlantic world, I was a little disappointed to find only one map, a map from 1699, and it's on the very last page before the notes (p. 354). I would've put it earlier, near the start, and I would've added a more modern map of the region for those readers not familiar with the old names.
All in all, the shortcomings are few and the strengths many in this well-written book about the origns of our modern world. (I haven't read as passionate and engaging a history since C.L.R. James's _The Black Jacobins_, Vantage Press, 1989.)

This kind of book may turn our world upside down, but it's about time we saw it from a different perspective.

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Summary: The Hidden History of the rise of Atlantic democracy
Review: This book is a treasure of insights and connections which counterpoints the usual and self serving version of history told through the citation of famous people, famous places, and famous things. I was looking for for connections between the Leveller's Agreement of the People and the specifics of the US Constitution, between which stands approximatley 150 years. This book assisted my understanding of the linkages and dismissed many popularly presumed disconnections. The Many Headed Hydra in effect tells the stories of the common people, slaves, sailors, and exiled agitators for democracy and how the resistance to corporate and despotic governance was carried on through to the non violent seizure of the means of governance in rural Massachusetts by the farmers in 1774. It is really no wonder why this book won the the International Labor History Award. This book does not favor preconceived assumptions of the nature and history of democracy, nor of the posturing imposed as the official version of the history of the America or the United States. This stories within this book include resistance to the privatization of common lands in England, as well as to the usurptation of lands within the American continents, slavery in its several forms including impressment and chattel, the beginning of global imperialism as we know it today, and the establishment of maroon societies. Any education about current global events and issues is incomplete without the knowledge of the historical perspective and background reflected in The Many-Headed Hydra. Each chapter could easily be expanded into a separate book. It is an excellent piece of collaboration and scholarship

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Summary: Tremendously overrated
Review: This is a deeply flawed book. It seeks to construct a radical reinterpretation of the early modern Atlantic world, one which privileges class conflict. To this end, it adopts a romantic, almost pre-Raphaelite vision of medieval European and Indian societies, and then recounts the destruction of those societies by the growth of capitalism. The authors' methodology is to comb through selected primary documents and secondary literature, picking out only those bits that fit the book's thesis. For example, they adopt the class elements of Edmund Morgan's analysis of Bacon's Rebellion (the part that has least survived subsequent scholarship) while doing their best to avoid branding the rebels with genocidal racism towards Indians, which Morgan (and every subsequent scholar) has argued drove the rebellion. Of course, presenting reinterpretations is the purpose of new scholarship, but the authors never actually make an argument or present evidence to justify their dismissal of these previous interpretations. The useful is recited, and the inconvenient is simply ignored.
The book is also awash in errors of fact, all of them conveniently aiding their argument. In fact there is often an interesting correlation between badly used evidence and a poorly referenced footnote. To take a few examples: the authors define antinomianism as the belief that God saves through a free gift of grace (perfectly orthodox Calvinism) and later as the doctrine that salvation occurs through faith alone (perfectly orthodox Protestantism). Their discussion of the Putney debates at one point quotes Thomas Rainborough so out of context as to reverse his intent, and the authors make a completely unsupported connection between the debates and opposition to African slavery. Their interpretation of the Antinomian crisis in Boston involves serious manipulations and omissions of evidence (ex. it is never mentioned that Captain Underhill, a commander in the Pequot War, was also one of Anne Hutchinson's followers; there is also no evidence for the authors' suggestion that the Hutchinsonians ever opposed the institution of slavery; and finally most of her followers were in fact merchants, not "proletarians"). While very much in the same school, the book lacks the subtlety and intelligence that E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill managed to give their finer works. In the end, the popularity of this book lies in its very polemical blindness. Like Wiccans reading Margaret Murray and feeling "it just has to be true," Marxists and anti-globalization protesters devour this book as a confirmation of all their own presuppositions. Evidence was never really necessary.

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Summary: History, and Current Affairs
Review: When the World Trade Organization meets, we are used to seeing protests from people who think that the global economy is somehow wrong, that current capitalism is not the best way to protect workers or the environment, and that the world should somehow be put on the right course. Such opposition seems like a recent phenomenon, but according to _The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic_ (Beacon Press) by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, there has been protest against capitalism ever since capitalism began. Their book is a valuable history to show that the ideas of property and land use that we take for granted were not inevitable.

The book's title comes from the legend of Hercules attempting to slay the hydra; whenever he cut one of the heads off the fearsome beast, two would grow in its place. The use of the story from the seventeenth century on was not just a boast of knowledge of the classics or a mere rhetorical ornament. The hydra, over and over again, stood for the mob, dispossessed commoners, religious radicals, pirates, sailors, slaves and more. Essentially, in religious and political harangues, the many heads of the hydra stood for all the unseemly factions that were standing in the way of those with possessions to get more possessions. As the book shows, mentioning decapitation of the hydra was in many cases not a figure of speech, but was a call to actual capital punishment, or simple murder. The main subjects of the book (and the authors write many of them up as heroes) are the often obscure sailors, slaves, and women who were caught up in the eighteenth century's enthusiasm for revolution and liberty. There were several engines that drove the protest. The claiming of the common land as personal property of those with wealth meant that (as was written in 1655) "the wealthy men would devour the poorer sort of people... and rich men, to make room for themselves, would jostle the poor people out of their commons." The indentures of workers sent to the colonies were often little better than slavery. Sailors were impressed into the Navy against their wills. By these means the elite strove to maintain political and economic power, and they were horrified whenever the hydra showed any protest.

The authors are professors of history who have both written about the eighteenth century, and here they have dug into books, diaries, and pamphlets of the period to look at the view of ordinary people. It is a dense book, a serious study lightened by biographical sketches and moving portrayals of men and women persecuted for damning tyranny and advocating liberty. There are accounts of rebellions large and small, of slave uprisings all over the New World, of sailors who mutinied against oppressive captains, and of pirates who, surprisingly, ran humane and democratic ships in opposition to the elite. What if all the dispossessed had won and something more egalitarian than capitalism as we know it had become the main operating system for the world? I suppose we would still have dispossessed of other categories, and we'd always have the poor around us. But the book shows that history as it happened was not what had to happen, and the global economy of centuries ago casts light on the troublesome global economy of our own time.